Hello,
I am looking for a way to generate pseudo random number sequences that will yield identical sequence results for a given seed across any platform. I am assuming that rand()/srand() is not going to be consistent (I could easily be wrong about this assumption).
The easiest way would be to write a random number generator yourself, but using a library that is released for different platforms and is guaranteed to give the same results could also work.
I doubt rand()/srand() are consistent, but I don't know it.
Something like a Mersenne Twister (from Boost.Random) is deterministic.
A quickly googled reference says:
Two different initializations with the same seed, instructs the pseudo-random generator to generate the same succession of results for the subsequent calls to rand in both cases.
But the question remains. I assume the above spec only applies to RNGs within the same process. It most likely doesn't specify anything about cross-platform or cross-compiler things. Your best bet is probably to find a library that is available for all desired platforms. Then you should be reasonably safe that if seeded with the same value they return the same sequence of numbers.
Knuth has released into the public domain C (and FORTRAN) source code for the pseudo-random number generator described in section 3.6 of The Art of Computer Programming.